 Alan Saunders explores the big questions and arguments; he looks at the world of philosophy and at the world through philosophy.Primary Format :
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2009-11-21 - Aristotle after Aristotle Just a few centuries after their deaths, Plato was thought questionable while his pupil Aristotle was all but canonised: there was almost a fear of criticising him. Everybody used his logic and Christians were drawn to him by his arguments about a first cause of all things. This week Han Baltussen from the University of Adelaide looks at the legacy of Aristotle and at why that legacy was worth preserving.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-11-14 - Seneca - philosophy and tragedy Lucius Annaeus Seneca popularised the philosophy of the Stoics, the Greek Hellenistic school. This week, Rick Benitez from the University of Sydney examines Seneca's teaching that contentedness is achieved by a simple, unperturbed life in accordance with nature and that human suffering should be accepted. He looks at Seneca as a writer of tragedies, and at the tragedy of Seneca's own life: he was tutor and later adviser to the Emperor Nero, who eventually ordered him to take his own life.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-11-07 - The Therapy of Desire - Epicureans and Stoics on the good life Can philosophy be practical and compassionate? Can it exist for human beings and not just for its own coldly logical reasons? This was a question asked by the philosophers of the Hellenistic age, that´s the period following Aristotle, who died in 322BC. This week, Martha Nussbaum from the University of Chicago, talks about desire and Hellenistic ethics.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-10-31 - Human cures and animal sacrifices This week Denise Russell from the University of Wollongong argues that animals held for experimental purposes are in the same moral condition as human beings held as slaves. Secrecy and the status of science protect these practices from critical scrutiny. So millions of animals suffer and die in Australian experiments each year, though in other countries alternative ways of seeking knowledge have been developed.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-10-24 - Beethoven and the modern Music can make us happy or sad, it can present us with fascinating complex patterns, but can it make us think? Ludwig van Beethoven believed that it could and this week we look at his relationship to the philosophy of his day and his legacy to the modern world. Liberation and heroic defiance, spiritual alienation and transcendence, personal autonomy and a new conception of musical time - all these distinctive aspects of modern thought are intimately bound up with Beethoven, his personalit ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-10-17 - What would Karl Marx think? Commodities, capitalism and computers. At a time when the Berlin Wall has fallen but Wall Street is decidedly shaky, a self-described lapsed Marxist takes us through some of the key philosophical and practical ideas of Karl Marx and argues for what is still useful today. What is worth keeping in Marx? He had his limitations but later thinkers have built on his core concepts and used his methods to produce results that still speak to the changing nature of work in contemporary Australia.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-10-10 - Gandhi and philosophy - the centenary of Hind Swaraj One hundred years ago the Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi took a boat from London to South Africa. Over ten days he wrote a long essay that for the first time melded his ideas about civilisation, violence, truth and the aims of life into a cohesive whole. The work is called Hind Swaraj and this week we explore it´s philosophical importance.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-10-03 - In search of civilisation This week, we polish up a tarnished idea and ask whether it´s really as tarnished as all that. The idea is civilisation and our guide to it is the Melbourne philosopher John Armstrong, author of a new book called In Search of Civilization: Remaking a Tarnished Idea. Why does he think that it´s a tarnished idea? And isn´t the very idea a bit messy? After all, civilisation has brought us lots of things, from the Mona Lisa to good plumbing, so what really does the word mean?Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-09-26 - "I can't go on, I'll go on" - Samuel Johnson and the Stoics Three hundred years ago this month, the great Samuel Johnson was born. He was a lexicographer, a poet, an essayist, a heroically good man and a tortured depressive. But was he also a philosopher? This week, we look at Johnson and at the ancient Stoics, whose sober philosophy combined with Christianity in Johnson´s view of the world.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-09-19 - Forging ahead - the philosophy of authenticity, fakes and forgers If a painting, a sculpture or even a recording of a musical performance has been widely admired, has given delight to many, and is then revealed to be a forgery or a copy, why reject it? The object itself hasn´t changed, so what has? When he find out that something is a forgery, we feel cheated, but do we have reason to feel like that? This week, The Philosopher´s Zone looks at this nagging question in the philosophy of art.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-09-12 - Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilisation: 50th anniversary Exactly fifty years ago, a 33-year-old Frenchman named Michel Foucault completed what would become one of the most influential works on the history of psychiatry: Madness and Civilization: A history of insanity in the age of reason. The book made a philosophical star of its author and changed our view of madness.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-09-05 - 150th anniversary of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty This year, we´re celebrating the 150th birthday of Darwin´s Origin of Species, but that wasn´t the only significant book to be published in 1859. That year also saw the publication of On Liberty by the English philosopher John Stuart Mill. It´s a striking book, which finds the threats to liberty not in the tyranny of kings or dictators but in the oppressive weight of public opinion. This surely makes it a very modern work. Today, we investigate what Mill had to say, where it´s still re ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-08-29 - What makes a world class philosophy department? - The case of Melbourne University We´re often told that, when it comes to philosophy, Australia is punching above its weight. A country as small as ours ought not to be producing so many fine philosophers as we have. But have those days come to an end? Over in Chicago, the Philosophy Gourmet Report, which ranks philosophy departments in the English-speaking world, has demoted the University of Melbourne's department out of the top fifty. What does this mean for the University and for philosophy in Australia?Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-08-22 - Power, prejudice and the murder of Stephen Lawrence In London in 1993, a black teenager named Stephen Lawrence was fatally stabbed by a small gang of white teenagers. His friend Duwayne Brooks was a witness but the police failed to take his testimony seriously. When someone speaks but is not heard because of accent, sex, or colour, that person is undermined as a knower. This week, we look at was it means to do justice to someone´s status as a knower.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-08-15 - The epistemology of blogging Blogging has changed the way in which people acquire knowledge and justify their beliefs. But are these changes good or bad? Do we know more and do we know differently as a result of blogging? And is it all beneficial for democracy? Some philosophers have their doubts, but this week we meet one who thinks that blogging is good news.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-08-08 - Are ethicists ethical? If philosophical moral reflection improves moral behaviour, then you might expect professional ethicists to behave especially well. So why are books on ethics more likely to be stolen from university libraries than other books? Why don´t people who study ethics participate more in the life of the community? And if the study of ethics doesn´t make them better people, what hope is there for the rest of us?Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-08-01 - The Philosopher and the Wolf For more than ten years, Mark Rowlands, currently professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, lived with his pet wolf, Brenin. This week on The Philosopher´s Zone, he talks about their shared life and what it has to tell us about how we view other animals, and how we think of ourselves.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-07-25 - Governance and the Yuck Factor In his inaugural address, President Barack Obama expressed an ambition to bridge the divide between predominantly conservative `red states´ and predominantly liberal `blue states´ and to unite all Americans in a common purpose of remaking the nation for the new century. Stephen Clarke from the University of Oxford argues that his will not be easy to do as liberal and conservative demands often pull in opposite directions. Furthermore, the divide between liberals and conservatives goes de ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-07-18 - The Rebirth of Nature In the seveteenth century, the great French philosopher Rene Descartes devised a picture of the world in which we are isolated egos dwelling in a world of lifeless matter with creates life by its motion.
But what does this have to do with our reaction to the threat of global warming? In a talk called `The Rebirth of Nature and the Climate Crisis´, delivered this month at the University of Sydney Hamilton, Clive Hamilton, Charles Sturt Professor of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-07-11 - The Philosopher and the Novelist This week, we look at a philosopher and at a novelist, and we find out what the one had to say to the other.
Moira Gatens an Australian Professorial Fellow in the philosophy department at the University of Sydney. And she has just been appointed to the very important Spinoza Chair for 2010 at the University of Amsterdam. This means, amongst presenting the annual Spinoza lecture at Spinoza House in Rijnsburg, where the benches on which Spinoza worked in the seventeenth century at his trade ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-07-04 - Philosophy - The great divide (Continental / Analytic) This week, we examine a division in the philosophical world, between what´s called analytic philosophy, as practised in the English-speaking world and the Nordic nations, and continental philosophy. If you´re an analytical philosopher, all that French and German stuff looks vague, verbose and romantic. If you´re sitting Paris, the analytical stuff is likely to seem abstract, dry and quite unconnected with human realities. Professor Paul Patton straddles the divide and this week he t ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-06-27 - Is philosophy irrelevant to science? Scientists get on with the job – they do stuff with test tubes or with computers – but can philosophers help them? Do they need help and, if so, do they think they need help? This week, we examine what philosophers of science talk about and what effect it might have on what scientists actually do.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-06-20 - The Romantic Movement and rock music Romantic ideas and philosophy live on in certain strains of modern rock music, according to this week's guest, Craig Schuftan, author of Hey Nietzsche - Leave them kids alone. David Bowie, The Cure, The Smiths, Queen, and more contemporary bands like My Chemical Romance and Weezer share some seriously Romantic tendencies with people like Byron, Schopenhauer, Wagner and even Nietzsche - and it's not just because they all viewed the world through the same gloomy prism.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-06-13 - A conversation with Isaiah Berlin Last week, we commemorated the centenary of the birth of the greatest British philosopher and historian of ideas, Isaiah Berlin. This week, we raid the ABC archives for a long interview in which Berlin talks about human freedom: are we free and, if we are not free, can we be moral? Are we responsible for what we do or can circumstances let us off the hook?Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-05-23 - Jekyll and Hyde and criminal responsibility The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was published in 1886. It was hugely successful and has given us one of the archetypes of our time, but what does it have to tell us about our attitudes to guilt? Was Dr Jekyll a murderer or does the fact that the crimes were committed by his alter-ego, Edward Hyde, get him off the hook? This week on The Philosopher´s Zone, we examine the problem of guilt and responsibility.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-05-16 - Thinking about the lives of the great thinkers Ray Monk from the University of Southampton in the UK is something unusual in philosophers of the English-speaking world: he´s a biographer. This week, he tell us about the challenges of writing the lives of Bertrand Russell and of the great Ludwig Wittgenstein and why the thinks that biography is a very Wittgensteinian genre.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-05-09 - The unhappy family of Ludwig Wittgenstein Sometimes it´s easy to forget that long dead philosophers had families; a world beyond the cocoon of their thinking and writing; a life with all the joy and sadness and conflict that a family can provide. The 20th century Viennese philosopher's family might today be described as deeply dysfunctional, as well as cultured and hugely wealthy. We're joined by Alexander Waugh, author of, The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-05-02 - The philosophy of the quantum spook Does physics offer us a fuzzy picture of a clear reality or a clear picture of a fuzzy reality? In 1947, Albert Einstein told Max Born -- a great physicist and the grandfather of Olivia Newton-John -- that he couldn´t accept quantum theory because it involved `spooky actions at a distance.´ But does having quantum theory without the spooks mean believing in time travel? Huw Price, philosopher and physicist, helps us boldly go.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-04-25 - Philosophy and The Wealth of Nations - P.J. O'Rourke Adam Smith is known today as the father of economics, but he was, by profession, a philosopher. His book The Wealth of Nations is an attempt to apply philosophy to the world of money-making and commerce. This week, we dip into his great work with the help of P.J O´Rourke, the American political commentator, wit and author of a recent study of Smith.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-04-18 - Ideals and dirty hands - C.A.J. Coady What´s wrong with moralism in politics? Can you be moral and advocate morality while at the same time being aware of your own moral failings? Can you at the same time be an idealist and a realist? And what about dirty hands? Do the supreme emergencies of political life sometimes mean that you might have to do things that you would normally regard as immoral? Some hard questions about the realities of political life this week on The Philosopher´s Zone.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-04-11 - Getting down to reality: Raymond Geuss Lenin divided people into two kinds: `who´ and `whom´. For him, the important question in politics was who does what to whom? But is this grimly realistic view of power neglected by philosophers with too much of an interest in justice, equality, rights and other ideals? This week, we look at realism and what it means for political philosophy.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-04-04 - Hypatia of Alexandria - a philosophical martyr Hypatia of Alexandria was beautiful and clever, and, as far we know, never did anybody any harm, so why was she torn to pieces by an angry mob, armed (so some stories tell) with oyster shells? This week, we look at the woman and the heritage of what is probably the longest-standing philosophical tradition in Western civilisation: that rational yet mystical, sometimes Pagan, sometimes Christian, body of doctrines known as Neo-Platonism.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-03-28 - Voice in the wilderness - R.G. Collingwood R.G. Collingwood—philosopher, archaeologist, historian—was a man difficult to place, who felt very much an outsider in the philosophical world at the time of his death in 1943. Yet, today what he was interested in is very much like the sort of thing we're interested in: the hidden presuppositions behind our ways of thought and doing history as a form of re-enactment. The world looks very different when seen from the point of view of this neglected figure.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-03-21 - Understanding and blame while the money runs out It´s not a good time to be a big noise in banking or the motor industry, but who are the really guilty parties here and do the media help us to understand what´s going on? Can business ethics enable us to draw lines between culpability, incompetence and culpable incompetence? And are the ethics of the media totally compromised by spin and image manipulation?Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-03-14 - Talking to the animals You can talk to the animals till the cows come home but will they talk back? Perhaps they do and you just don´t get the message. Either way, the fact that animals don´t seem to possess language has, since ancient Greek times, encouraged the view that they´re not capable of being rational and therefore not fit to be members of the community. This week, the Dutch philosopher René ten Bos questions our time-honoured views of animals and how to behave towards them.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-03-07 - A rear view of Alfred Hitchcock A rear view of Alfred Hitchcock is a view that takes in what lies behind and beneath. And what we find is a profoundly pessimistic, though not hopeless, view of the world and a keen interest in the way we see it. How do we interpret what we see? And can we see without interpretation? Can life approach perfection or are we doomed to get it wrong? Serious philosophical questions, all addressed by the fat Englishman who made movies for Hollywood.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-02-28 - Providence lost? `Providence´ is not a word of which we make much use these days. For us, it tends to be a synonym for good fortune or perhaps a sense that somebody is watching over us. But what is providence if it isn´t whatever deliveries you a prize in the lottery? To the ancient Greeks, providence was the inherent purpose and rational structure of the world, and this week we meet the Australian philosopher Genevieve Lloyd, who argues that the idea can still help us clarify the ideas of freedom and a ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-02-21 - Burning issues: the ethics of firefighting You´re a firefighter and you have a choice: do you save the old person, who´s relatively easy to save, or do you go for the child when your attempt might not be successful and you might lose your own life trying? Fire fighting has been much on all our minds lately. There are a lot of practical and emotional issues here, but is there anything philosophical to talk about? We meet a philosopher who has been battling with the ethical issues of the firefighter´s life.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-02-14 - Charles Darwin - The Philosopher's Zone and All in the Mind Special The human animal is a complex beast - we mate, fight, emote, and socialise in curious ways. Charles Darwin´s theories continue to provoke controversy over how and why we behave the way we do. Join leading evolutionary scientists and philosophers in this one hour special, as presenters Alan Saunders and Natasha Mitchell consider how Darwin radically influenced the life of the mind. From the philosophical and historical excavations of Darwinian thought, to contemporary adventures of Darw ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-02-14 - Charles Darwin - The Philosopher's Zone and All in the Mind Special The human animal is a complex beast - we mate, fight, emote, and socialise in curious ways. Charles Darwin´s theories continue to provoke controversy over how and why we behave the way we do. Join leading evolutionary scientists and philosophers in this one hour special, as presenters Alan Saunders and Natasha Mitchell consider how Darwin radically influenced the life of the mind. From the philosophical and historical excavations of Darwinian thought, to contemporary adventures of Darw ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-02-07 - Philosophy in the mountains - Arne Naess Arne Næss, who died in January just a couple of weeks short of his ninety-seventh birthday, was a great mountaineer and part of the history of twentieth-century philosophy. He started out as a member of the great philosophical school the Vienna Circle but was better known as the founder of the movement known as deep ecology. This week, we pay tribute to the man and his work.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-01-31 - Radical hope Jonathan Lear, author of Radical hope - ethics in the face of cultural devastation, takes us through the story of an American Indian nation, the Crow, and their last great chief, Plenty Coups. Plenty Coup died an old man in 1932, having lived through the complete upheaval of Crow life and culture. So how did he show courage and hope when his very framework for understanding those concepts had disappeared?Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-01-24 - Gavagai! This week, we continue our look at translation by examining the extreme case of radical translation. How do you translate from a language which has no connection with yours and of which you do not speak a single word, and what does all this have to do with the mysterious word 'gavagai'?
We also continue our look at the challenges of translating philosophy this week focusing on translating French, German and English.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-01-24 - Gavagai! This week, we continue our look at translation by examining the extreme case of radical translation. How do you translate from a language which has no connection with yours and of which you do not speak a single word, and what does all this have to do with the mysterious word 'gavagai'?
We also continue our look at the challenges of translating philosophy this week focusing on translating French, German and English.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-01-17 - Philosophy in another tongue Philosophy aspires to universal truths but it has to do so in a particular language. How does the language in which philosophy is expressed affect what can and cannot be said, and how does translation affect our understanding of it? This week, we ask a Chinese philosopher how different Confucius is in English and we consider attempts to make Plato sound as though he came from Oxford.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2009-01-10 - Islam and philosophy - Tariq Ramadan The holy Koran is held by Muslims to be the literal word of God, and if you've got that, who needs philosophy? This week we put that question to the distinguished and controversial Muslim thinker Tariq Ramadan, who tells us that Islam not only needs philosophy but has already shared its insights with the West.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2008-12-27 - The Emergence of Science, Part 1 In the twenty-first century, science doesn't just explain the world, it dominates the world. Religion, art, human relationships, history -- we expect them all to be explained in scientific terms.
How did science acquire this dominance over our way of thinking? Today, in the first episode of a two-part special, we examine the rise of science in the western mind.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2008-12-06 - Teaching children to be philosophers How young is too young to think philosophically? Philosophers like Philip Cam from the University of New South Wales say there's no developmental reason why primary school age children can´t be taught to think and to reason, and that developing these skills has a significant effect on their lives both in and out of the classroom.
So this week we spend time with a Grade 6 class at Stanmore Public School in Sydney as it grapples with what constitutes a meaningful life.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
2008-10-18 - Why Asian philosophy? - UPDATED For a long while, Western philosophy has had little to do with the philosophical traditions of India and China. A common view amongst Western philosophers was that all thought in the Asian traditions was not philosophy, but religion or mysticism. But now, slowly, Western philosophers are starting to engage with Asian thought. This week, Graham Priest, Professor of Philosophy at Melbourne University, talks about what these philosophers are finding there, and why it´s often challenging for so ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | |
